Grace After Henry by Eithne Shortall

Author:Eithne Shortall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

THIRTY-FOUR

Ihave a thing about doctors. Doctors, hairdressers and waiters. I don’t know why, but I always wanted them to like me. So ideally, we would have gotten off to a more innocuous start with some nice, blameless ailment that, if undetected, didn’t throw my intelligence so justifiably into question. Thrush, for example, would have been perfect. That’s what I was thinking as I looked around the surgery, trying to avoid eye contact. I’d have killed for thrush.

‘Have a think,’ said the doctor again, turning the calendar to face me. ‘It helps some people to have a visual aid.’

‘I really have no idea,’ I told her. ‘I’m usually not this stupid, honestly. I got three As in my leaving cert. Including Biology.’

‘Take your time, Grace, there’s no rush.’

‘I don’t know.’

We had been going around in circles since she confirmed my pregnancy by having me pee into a container a few minutes earlier. She’d delivered the prognosis with a cautiously upbeat formality I presumed all doctors used in these situations, not having a clue if they were confirming someone’s wildest dreams or darkest nightmares.

I looked around at the certificates on the wall and the family photos on the desk. There were more pictures of her dogs than her children. One, two, three – yep. Four versus three. To be fair, the golden retriever was very cute. When I brought my gaze back she was still smiling expectantly, notepad in front of her.

I sighed. The height chart by the door was starting to look like one you’d get in a police interrogation room.

‘Doctor,’ I started.

‘Call me Rachel.’

‘Rachel,’ I corrected, ‘I’m not being smart but if I had the wherewithal to remember menstrual dates, do you not think I would have been here a lot sooner than this?’

Dr Rachel smiled harder. I was losing her. If she was a waiter, she’d be in the kitchen right now spitting in my food.

‘Like I said, though,’ I added brightly, not willing to admit defeat entirely, ‘I know the date of conception. Is that not better? More exact?’

‘And like I said, Grace, that’s not how we calculate it.’

‘It’s all I’ve got.’ And I repeated what was fast becoming the most significant date of my life: ‘February nineteenth.’

The morning Henry left for work and never came back, we had sex. I remembered because weekday-morning sex was not our usual routine. And also because he died later that day. The weekends were always up for grabs, day or night, but on weekdays we were traditionalists: bedtime or not at all. We hadn’t done it in a few days and as I climbed on top of him that morning, toothbrush abandoned to the folds of the duvet, I had a vague doubt about my pill-taking but I didn’t dwell on it. Kids were on the near-future agenda, right after the house. We talked about them on an increasingly regular basis and had semi-consciously gotten more lax about birth control. Less than twelve hours later Henry’s organs had been ripped to shreds and I hadn’t thought about the contraceptive pill since.

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